(Yicai) June 12 -- Inquiries about new homes for sale in Shanghai rose over the Dragon Boat Festival holiday after the city government brought out new policies to revitalize the housing market.

“About 200 groups of customers visited our sales office in Shanghai every single day of the Dragon Boat Festival holiday,” the sales manager of a new housing project in the city’s Pudong New Area told Yicai. The three-day break ended on June 10.

Late last month, the Shanghai authorities lifted most home-buying constraints, including a further easing downpayment and mortgage restrictions, that were introduced during the city’s real estate boom. Many other major cities in China took also similar steps last month.

That spurred the interest of many potential buyers over the holiday period, Zhang Bo, director of think tank 58 Anjuke Institute, told Yicai.

But the average daily sales area of new homes in Shanghai and Beijing was down by more than 40 percent over the holiday, compared with a year earlier, according to China Index Academy data. The figures for Guangzhou and Shenzhen, the other two first-tier cities, rose 6 percent and 1 percent, respectively.

The average sales area of new homes in 30 major cities jumped over 60 percent for the Dragon Boat Festival holiday from the Labor Day Holiday at the start of May, but fell 16 percent from a year ago, CIA data also showed.

Meanwhile, second-hand home transactions in major cities climbed during the holiday, surging 192 percent in Shanghai and 158 percent in Shenzhen,  per the data. Other big cities, including Hangzhou, Wuxi, Nanning, Wenzhou, Foshan, and Huzhou, also scored gains.

Pre-owned home sales in Beijing fell 13 percent because the city retained much tighter home purchase restrictions, the CIA noted.

Property deals may continue to recover with the gradual implementation of policy support in first- and second-tier cities, said Chen Wenjing, market research director at the CIA.

Moreover, June is the final sprint for developers to boost their semi-annual performance, so activity in core cities may go on improving in the short term, easing the decline in new home sales by area, Chen noted. But a shift in expectations over personal incomes is still needed to achieve an overall market turnaround, she added.

The performance of property markets in small and medium-sized cities remains unsatisfactory. A source at a troubled builder told Yicai that the policies introduced last month did not significantly boost sales because most of the firm’s projects are in small and mid-sized cities where policy was already loose.

Editor: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione